Vizrt has upgraded its Viz World map and geographical animations tool to integrate with OpenStreetMap (OSM).

With the new integration, Viz World users can access OSM community data from within the Viz World interface, effectively giving Vizrt users access to vector street data for most of the world.

OpenStreetMap is an open source online map database accessible at www.openstreetmaps.org. It provides a free, editable map of the world through the efforts of many contributors around the world.

For Vizrt users, OSM street data is converted to shape files by an OSM-approved third party. The shape files are then converted to a format that is optimized for use in Vizrt’s rendering engine. The conversion makes it faster to render the vectors and search the database.